Welcome to the final meeting of the Agile Alliance.

I am pleased to announce that the mission of the Agile Alliance has been accomplished, and we are dissolving immediately. I’d like to summarize the accomplishments – your accomplishments – that have made this possible.

When, three years ago, the supporters of Extreme Programming, and those of Scrum took matters into their own hands, and over the objections of the founders of their methods, merged their practices into a simple method that addressed both technical and project guidance issues, few people were really surprised. Effective Scrum teams had been quietly adopting XP practices for years.

It was a bit more surprising when, a year later, the smaller but more playful Crystal community joined in, giving the new integrated method a pattern, and a set of criteria, for scaling projects in terms of size, and in terms of risk.

It was about the same time that the Scaled Agile community, recognizing that they were no more than a synthesis of existing material, joined the growing group. With that in place, other fringe methods such as “Disciplined Agile Development” made the decision to join as well. After that, it was simply natural that the dwindling DSDM camp would join the coalition, and that the corporate and organizational focus of Adaptive Software Development in fit in smoothly.

Pieces fell into place more and more rapidly. Agile Modeling and Agile Testing finally came home after running away to join the circus. FDD took its rightful place as the foundational approach to handling multiple teams and adding architectural and tools focus.

The capstone to the emerging – and merged – new method was Lean Software Development, which provides, as we all know, a combination of focus on continuous improvement and on strong integration of the team’s concentration on the whole business picture.

As we look at it now, of course, it’s clear that all of these factions had a part of the truth, but like the old tale of the blind men and the elephant, they were in contact with the whole thing, but only perceived a part.

The final piece fell into place just a few months ago, when the Software Engineering Institute petitioned the Alliance to be permitted to join us as a Special Interest Group, and settled for being allowed to have a Software Engineering Symposium as part of one of our five annual international conferences.

Now I’d like to ask the creators and leaders of all the old “Agile” methods to join me here on the stage, and to receive your applause for getting this all started off ten – no, twenty – no, even thirty years ago.

It has been a long road, and these leaders have done their best throughout. It is a tribute to that, that they stand before you, arm in arm, victorious as a group despite their individual defeats.

I’d like to remind you that although it was you, the membership, who made these things happen, sometimes over the objections of the method creators, it was their original work that you have shaped into today’s way of building software.

It is therefore my honor to stand with these great men and women, and to stand before all of you, as I close the final meeting of the Agile Alliance, and open the first meeting of the International Software Development Alliance.

Thank you!